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The course invites artists, students, and scholars in humanities and social sciences who are engaged in the production, distribution, and analysis of documentary visual imagery and who recognize film as an important communication medium. The intense 6-day program aims at advancing individual participants’ projects with the help of masterclasses and tutoring sessions run by a network of academics and film practitioners. The course also sets to raise awareness of documentary films as cultural and social capital and an important change-making tool. It was developed collaboratively by faculty from six academic institutions working in the field of film and visual arts who bring their best teaching practices to the CEU Budapest summer school. The course is a safe space to create, learn, and obtain competent feedback on the documentary projects in the making as well as to join a community of engaged scholars and documentary practitioners. 

This summer school focuses on how understanding the human mind as a tool for navigating a richly social existence can inform our understanding and advocacy of open society, and the ideals it represents.

The notion of open society is an attempt to answer the question of how we can effectively live together in large and modern environments. Its ideals include commitments to the rule of law, freedom of association, democratic institutions, and the free use of reason and critical analysis. Arguments in favour of these ideals necessarily depend on assumptions—sometimes hidden and unexamined—about the human mind. Yet our knowledge of how the mind works has advanced considerably since the notion of the open society was first developed. Especially over the past 30 or so years, it has become increasingly clear that human minds are not fundamentally geared towards cold logic and problem solving as, for instance, Karl Popper assumed. Humans do these things but they are not the essential functions of the mind. Nor are human minds geared simply towards a simple utility calculus: we are not Homo economicus. What the modern sciences of the mind have revealed is the extent to which human psychology is geared towards effectiveness in a world of repeated interpersonal engagement. If we are ‘rational’, then we are rational in the mode of someone like Jürgen Habermas, who viewed humans as socially smart, critically-minded communicators.

This five-day intensive course investigates the ethical dimensions of attention. We live in the attention economy, where attention is commodified and manipulated. Attentional crises abound: big tech, social media, and the pandemic have eroded people’s attentional capacities. Attention, though, is paramount to personal and institutional flourishing. Attending to people, places, and projects is at the heart of love, community, justice, good relationships, creativity, art, education, and mental health. It is also a central, but overlooked, component of justice. We can wrong each other with attention patterns. Improper attention can also create unfair and dangerous social disparities; scientists might overlook medical differences between women and men, for example, and fail to notice this oversight. And yet theorists lack adequate frameworks for conceptualising and assessing this. There is a dearth of research on attention, and the ethics of attention is seldom featured in university courses.

In the context of new approaches to learning and teaching at universities (student-centered learning, inclusive and democratic classrooms, teaching with new technologies, etc.) there is a growing need for professional development for teaching faculty. New initiatives that emphasize teaching excellence have encouraged universities worldwide to look at possible ways to further develop the teaching skills of their faculty members. Universities - particularly those in Central and Eastern Europe and the Global South – often lack sufficient experts who can engage as higher education advisors or trainers in the areas of teaching and learning.  

Therefore, there is a growing need on one hand, to train faculty members on revising their own courses and teaching approaches, and, on the other hand, to help them become agents of change who can provide advice, training, coaching, and support to their peers.

This course offers a multi-perspectival overview of feminist praxis and its interrelationship with arts-based research approaches. It introduces participants to a variety of investigative approaches that centre women’s and other marginalised knowledges with the aim of creating more gender-just societies and more democratic knowledge-sharing infrastructures across the Global South and Global North.  

The course draws on an inclusive, expansive notion of gender where a focus on ‘women’ encompasses the lived realities of those who identify as or have been identified or represented as ‘woman’, providing an entry point into understanding cis, trans, queer, and non-binary experiences and the power relations within which they are embedded. 

Beliefs in witchcraft, the power of humans to intervene in the flow of life events and to harm others by supernatural means, is widely distributed both geographically and chronologically. How in European history the accusations were developed and put together with the elaboration of a sufficiently coherent framework of reference can be the focus of historical attention. This is indeed part of a wider process of formation of scapegoat images through time and on different social targets, from the heretics to the lepers, and from the Jews to the witches, ultimately. All this, along with the late medieval construction of the concept of the diabolic witches’ Sabbath, constitute a historical issue, the discussion and the understanding of which demand the involvement of a multidisciplinary way of approaching historical inquiry as well as an open-minded sight. This course aims to lay out the rise and downturn of witch-beliefs in medieval and early modern Europe, tracing the multifaceted roots leading to their construction, from the Classical Greek and Roman literary traditions to medieval lore and popular beliefs, up to the outburst of the “witch-craze” in early modern Europe. We would dedicate this time more attention to the shaping of beliefs and their role in igniting witchcraft prosecutions both within and beyond the paradigmatic West-European persecution waves: Central and Eastern Europe, modern witch-hunts in the global South, and neopagan revival activities will be studied in a comparative way.

This 9-day, intensive summer course will investigate the genealogy of the era of the witness, focusing on the emergence of Holocaust testimony as the model for eyewitness documentation of 20th and 21st-century atrocities, and its impact on efforts to record and represent subsequent human rights abuses and acts of mass violence.

The course will feature a series of workshops, seminars, public lectures, and film screenings. The goal of the course is to bring together leading scholars of testimony and oral history, who engage in highly interdisciplinary approaches to documenting, studying, and interpreting the Holocaust and other genocides and mass atrocities through the lens of first-person accounts.

Participants will explore the vast genre of Holocaust testimony through readings, lectures, and hands-on work with a variety of primary sources. The course interrogates testimonies from historical, legal, and moral perspectives, raising theoretical and methodological questions about the "afterlife" of these sources, which are highly relevant for a wide variety of scholarly fields, including History, Jewish Studies, Nationalism Studies, Genocide Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural and Literary Studies, Memory Studies and Legal Studies. In the second week of the course, special emphasis will be placed on the impact of digitization and new digital methods for presenting and analyzing digital testimonies and their corresponding metadata.

The course examines the complex challenges of translating education policies for promoting access and equity into tangible outcomes through program design and implementation. Specifically, the course will focus on the policy-implementation nexus in the complexities of resource-constrained contexts of the global south. With theoretical and experiential insights from cases of actual education policy successes and failures in the global south, this course will provide the participants with a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of policy implementation for achieving desired outcomes in low-resource contexts.   

The course builds on the knowledge foundation of the OSUN Certificate in Global Educational Development (GLOBALED), a network course bringing together students from diverse OSUN-affiliated institutions from four continents and was piloted as a summer course in 2023. The course will draw upon bodies of scholarship in education policy, public administration, and international development to offer the participants a nuanced understanding of processes and factors that shape education policy implementation in low-resource contexts in the global south and for under-served populations in the global north.

Geospatial technologies and remote sensing are valuable resources for monitoring the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their corresponding targets and indicators. They enable unbiased observation and analysis across borders, administrative boundaries, and nations. Furthermore, geospatial information and technologies are particularly critical for strengthening urban and rural resilience, where economic, agricultural, and various social sectors intersect.

However, there is still a gap between the tremendous potential of these technologies and the world of environmental decision- and policy-makers. Not only can the immense realm of geospatial technologies seem daunting, but it is also challenging to keep up with the ever-evolving applications of geospatial technologies.

This year’s workshop emphasizes building community resilience to disasters and climate change, aligned with the UN's "Early Warnings for All" initiative.

Our course takes a highly interdisciplinary angle at modern musicology. Postulating musicology as an integral part of heritage studies, we employ its methods to investigate broader subjects: music acts as a prism through which social processes and identity formation unfold. The erudition of our excellent lecturers, the openness encoded in the course, and the varied professional and cultural backgrounds of participants have contributed to a revelatory summer course of collective exploration, repeating each year. 

Our focus in 2024 is storytelling, its archaic, traditional, and contemporary forms, and its role in community and identity building. Musical storytelling has resonated over thousands of years of human culture, as accessible as few other creative outputs, and of unique binding force. The perspective of heritage provides valuable insight into deciphering audiovisual languages prevalent today as well as questions of identity, belonging, and imagined and actual communities. 

Conservative governments and far-right movements across different country contexts share a set of strikingly similar strategies that can be summed up as ‘demographic imaginaries.’ They facilitate a backlash against progressive reproductive and women’s rights, same-sex marriage, and LGBT+ communities, the use of coercive policies and rhetoric against religious, ethnic, and other minorities, or anti-immigration policies. Demographic anxieties are nurtured by conspiracy myths such as the narrative of the “great replacement,” just as much as by other forms of majoritarian identity politics which imagine the majority (be it: white, Christian and heterosexual, Hindu National, Turkish Sunni Muslim, or European etc.) as threatened by political, ethnic, religious, sexual and other minorities and their struggles for equal rights.

Since antiquity, through the French and American revolutions, and into its modern and contemporary configurations, democracy has promised political equality. Somewhere along the way, democracy came to be understood as a political system that could deliver equality beyond the political realm as well. Today, the belief persists that, at some level, democracy promotes social and economic equality more effectively and reliably than any other mode of governance. This belief persists despite an increasing share of wealth and property flowing to a small elite and tears in the social fabric visible in polarized populations and the rise of ethno-nationalism. Democracy and social and economic inequality are extremely compatible. 

So, what is the relationship between democracy and equality? What does the pursuit of equality look like in a modern democracy? To what extent are economic and social equality necessary for democratic flourishing? To what extent are they worthwhile goals in the first place?

The main aim of the summer course is to examine if, when, and how citizenship regimes are used by authoritarian and illiberal governments as a means of weakening the rights of undesired populations and to include targeted groups to strengthen the legitimacy and the power of the government. In addition to exploring citizenship politics and legislation in times of democratic decline, the course will also investigate the micro-politics of citizenship by looking into how individuals use, respond to, hijack, or ignore these policies. Such an approach springs from the need to address two main intellectual challenges, which are rooted in the relationship between democracy and citizenship.

Scholarship has long examined the construction of membership in democratic societies, often associating open and expansive citizenship with democracy, inclusion, and pluralism. Far less academic energy has been dedicated to the trajectories of citizenship policies in countries, which have become the site of growing illiberalism and democratic decline. By exploring citizenship policies at the time of democratic decline, the course will fill an important gap in citizenship studies scholarship.

The climate crisis requires changes to the major systems that cause climate change (energy and agriculture) and those that need to adapt (agriculture and water). Changes to these three different systems are essential for ensuring resiliency and adaptability for communities, countries, and regions. Because of the complexity of each of these topics, research, and education usually focus on a subset within each of these systems. This course provides a larger picture of the challenges within and between the systems.  

The aim is to educate a group of leaders who can prompt others to think of the interconnections and facilitate change in their everyday work.  The course takes a global focus by drawing on expert instructors from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The course provides a platform to connect student leaders from around the globe and build their capacity to work on solutions for social issues by contextualizing their own leadership experiences within a transnational framework.  Exploring historical, philosophical, and practical elements of civic engagement, students will consider the underlying question of what it means to be an engaged citizen in the early 21st century.  Focusing on issues related to political participation, civil society, associational life, social justice, and personal responsibility, the class balances the study of theoretical notions of civic life while empowering students to be active participants in the communities in which they are situated.  

Taking advantage of the international diversity of the faculty and students, the course reflects on the causes of social, political, economic, and environmental issues and explores potential solutions through a series of lectures, workshops, discussions, and reflections.  Together students will learn how to articulate their responsibilities toward their local, national, and global communities to help “foster a sense of the “we” and encourage them to bring their talents, viewpoints, and skills to community work” regardless of the local context.  The course enhances the skills and knowledge of students to help them become engaged citizens.